Dennis Bergkamp

The Man Who Transformed Arsenal

It was August 1995, and Dennis Bergkamp had just played his first game for Arsenal at the club’s cosy, iconic Highbury Stadium, a friendly against his old club Internazionale. Afterwards, two Dutch journalists and I snuck into Highbury’s marble halls to wait for the great man. Bergkamp's family was already there, hanging around while Dennis got changed. The father, an electrician, was standing with his hands folded behind his back studying framed pictures of Arsenal greats. He would have known most of them; like many Dutchmen of his generation, Bergkamp Sr. was an Anglophile, who named his youngest son after Manchester United hero Denis Law. The father and a Bergkamp brother greeted us shyly. This was not a loud family.

After Bergkamp finally appeared, and quiet Bergkampian family greetings had been exchanged, I walked him to the Highbury car park and begged him to give me an interview one day. He was reluctant, he explained. Amsterdam’s local newspaper had once run an article headlined, "Does Dennis Bergkamp like girls?," which identified him as the only Ajax player without a girlfriend. Since then he’d been wary of journalists.

Bergkamp rarely spoke during his career, yet you always knew that this most intelligent of players had something to say. That’s why his marvellous new “non-autobiography” is such a gift. Much of the value comes from the book’s frank interviews about Bergkamp, conducted by his co-writer David Winner with the likes of Wenger, Johan Cruyff, and many of Bergkamp’s Arsenal teammates. It all takes you back to an era that began that night at a now-demolished Highbury: a time when a transfer changed a club — even a league — and perhaps, in a tiny way, a country.

Bergkamp celebrating one of his first Arsenal goals in the 1995/96 season

It’s hard today to remember how sorry a club Arsenal was that summer of 1995. Its nickname was “Boring, Boring Arsenal.” Its two best players, Tony Adams and Paul Merson, were alcoholics (Merson, who titled his own autobiography How Not to Be a Professional Footballer, had myriad other addictions, too). The club’s longtime manager, George Graham, had recently been sacked for taking “bungs,” i.e. pocketing money on transfers. His successor, Bruce Rioch, says in Bergkamp’s book: “I’ve had players come to me before training in tears because they’re thinking of committing suicide.” Adams adds: “In 1995 I wanted to die. I didn’t give a shit about Dennis Bergkamp.” On a pre-season tour to Sweden, after a hard day’s training, Bergkamp went for an evening walk with his wife and was surprised to see “eight or nine Arsenal players sitting outside a pub, drinking beer.”

In short, Arsenal was a good fit for drab mid-1990s London, a city where houses were cheap, pubs were ugly, “Cool Britannia,” was just breaking through and there wasn’t much to do at night after 11 p.m. unless an Arsenal player happened to crash his car into your front garden.

Bergkamp says in the book, “Something I often wonder about is: what were Arsenal thinking? Before I came it was ‘Boring, Boring Arsenal’. Then they buy me and David Platt… What did they have in mind for the future?” It seems the new Arsenal originated in the head of the club’s vice-chairman, a dapper London businessman named David Dein, who in the early 1990s had already been instrumental in creating the Premier League.